Turkey

Istanbul President Erdogan has spent much of this year slinging muck at Europe’s heads of state, and he has damaged a number of already precarious relationships. Now it looks as if he is about to come up against the force of US diplomacy and Turkey may find itself in trouble. Turkey and the US have been Nato allies since 1952. During that time, Turkey has played up its strategic position for military bases close to the Middle East. In turn, the US has downplayed a number of disputes between the two countries, particularly in recent years as the conflict in Syria has raged on. Even as they seemed to be

A hundred years after the Russian revolution, Russia has a tsar and a court. Proximity to Putin is the key to wealth, office and survival. The outward signs of a court society have returned: double-headed eagles, the imperial coat of arms, the cult of Nicholas II (one of whose recently erected statues has ‘wept tears’), an increasingly wealthy and subservient Orthodox Church. In 2013, ‘to strengthen the historical continuity of the Russian armed forces’, the main honour guard regiment in Moscow was renamed Preobrazhensky, after the oldest regiment of the Imperial Guard, founded by Peter the Great in 1683. A statue of St Vladimir, founder and Christianiser of the Russian

Istanbul The most dramatic part of President Erdogan’s visit to Washington this week was the punch-up between his security guards and Kurdish demonstrators on the lawn outside the Turkish embassy.  The protest was nothing unusual for a president who seems to provoke adoration and disgust in equal measure wherever he goes. Neither was the violent scuffle a surprise; Erdogan’s bodyguards did the same last time he was in the States. The news barely touched the Turkish press, and not only because there are few titles left on the news stands which offer opposition to Erdogan. When similar fights break out in the Turkish parliament, as they have done regularly over the past

Istanbul President Erdogan hardly swept to victory yesterday. But with 51 per cent of the electorate turning out in favour of his plans to transform Turkey into a state ruled by a hugely powerful presidency rather than the parliament, he now has his mandate to reshape the country in his own image – more religious, more authoritarian, and set to swivel away from Europe while forging new relations with its old Ottoman territories. His supporters celebrated well into the night, lighting flares, driving around the cities with their horns blaring, and waving flags bearing the face of their hero. Meawhile, thousands of distraught people took to the streets in my

Well farewell then Turkey.  Or at least, farewell the Turkey of Kemal Ataturk.  It’s a shame.  Ataturk-ism nearly made its own centenary. But the nation that he founded, which believed broadly in progressive notions such as a separation of mosque and state, has just been formally snuffed out.  President Erdogan’s success in the referendum to award himself Caliph-like powers for life finally sees the end of Turkey’s secular and democratic experiment. Perhaps the poll which gave him victory was rigged.  Perhaps it wasn’t.  In the same way that perhaps the ‘coup’ last summer was real.  Or perhaps it wasn’t.  Either way, it’s all worked out very well for the man

Ask any two Turkish nationalists how they will vote in their country’s upcoming referendum, and you’re likely to get two different answers. In just under a month, Turks will vote on a constitutional amendment that, if passed, will usher in the biggest political revolution since Kemal Ataturk founded the modern republic. It would shift the country from parliamentary democracy to executive presidency. This weekend I called round my contacts from Turkey’s various nationalist groups and asked them how they will vote. Exactly half said they will tick the box supporting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in his bid to become executive president with almost unchallenged power, and a potential mandate until 2029. The

These are the last days of the ‘caliphate’. The place Isis made their capital, Raqqa, in Syria, is encircled and cut off. They have already lost half of Mosul in Iraq, their largest city. Really, what did they expect? This was inevitable from the moment Isis declared war on everyone not in Isis. Defeat was even foreseen by one of the group’s leading thinkers, Abu al-Farouq al-Masri. ‘Announcing enmity to the world will strangle the caliphate in its cradle,’ he said last year. ‘This will bury our project alive.’ Al Masri (the ‘Egyptian’) is or was an elderly cleric and he was delivering a sermon in Raqqa meant as a